When I was growing up, there were three newspapers. Our local paper was the Quad-City Times, but we also had a subscription to the Des Moines Register, which was kind of a regional paper at the time. Finally, my grandparents had a subscription to the Chicago Tribune. Although we and they all lived in Iowa, my grandfather’s car dealership was located across the river in Rock Island, Illinois. (This was great for us, because we had access many summers to pretty great seats at Wrigley Field—we were a Cubs family, and some of my grandfather’s customers were season ticket holders.) I grew up with a strong sense of the differences between local, regional, and national newspapers (USA Today (“a newspaper with color?!”) started up shortly before I entered high school).
There are a few things I remember about the Trib. We did Sunday dinners at my grandparents’ house, and I probably first started reading the comics, some of which were different from the ones in the Register or the Times. At some point, I reached the age where feature writing about Chicago sportsballers was interesting to me as well. And again, at a certain age, I started “helping” my grandmother with the Sunday crossword (then later doing daily ones, mostly in the summers). It’s not something I’ve really thought about before, but I’m fairly sure that it was my grandma who got me into crosswords, to the point that one of my favorite gifts of all time is a framed copy of the NYT crossword from the day I was born, and to the point that I competed once in the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (374th place!). Let’s just say I’ve done a lot of crosswords since those days at my grandparents’ house.
But I wasn’t really thinking about crosswords this weekend. Instead, there was a tweet from James Fallows that occupied my brainspace. He offered the following excerpt from a recent Chicago Tribune editorial “purely as a specimen of writing style:”
He also shares a link to the original editorial which, as you might guess, is only slightly less awful than the excerpt. It’s bad enough that Fallows hedges his tweet against the possibility that this is “intentional trolling.” Honestly, I can’t be sure that it isn’t. From the weirdly patronizing tone, to some truly garbled sentences, to the occasional burst of word-soup (“compunction at co-opting the imprimatur”!), the editorial takes the road less travelled, guaranteeing that it wasn’t written by an AI if only because AI writing tends at least to be competent. And that’s setting aside the question of whether or not a tell-all memoir by a former(?) British royal deserves Editorial Board-level intervention in our own country. (I have my own opinion on this.)
Perhaps most egregious, for me, is how much of the editorial seems intent on shaming Harry for ignoring his better angels, and succumbing to the monetization of his pain, as though the editorial itself weren’t doing the same by fueling the very ecosystem that generates those rewards.
But there’s a larger story, beyond any single editorial, however awful I might find it. And that’s the way that the Tribune (and I’m assuming other newspapers) still performs Editorial Board pronouncements like these as though the organization hadn’t been radically transformed. “Here at the Tribune Editorial Board,” the piece begins, “we all have a number of years on Prince Harry.” When I see sentences like this, I imagine a room full of veteran journalists, discussing the topics of the day. But then, my imagination is heavily influenced by the portrayal of newspaper offices in the movies. The reality, I suspect, is much different:
After a long walk down a windowless hallway lined with cinder-block walls, I got in an elevator, which deposited me near a modest bank of desks near the printing press. The scene was somehow even grimmer than I’d imagined. Here was one of America’s most storied newspapers—a publication that had endorsed Abraham Lincoln and scooped the Treaty of Versailles, that had toppled political bosses and tangled with crooked mayors and collected dozens of Pulitzer Prizes—reduced to a newsroom the size of a Chipotle.
McKay Coppins is writing here specifically about the Tribune, in an essay published by the Atlantic a little more than a year ago, “A Secret Hedge Fund is Gutting Newsrooms.” I remember reading it at the time, because it referenced the Tribune, but I don’t know that it fully sank in. Coppins’ account of what’s happened to our newspapers is chilling:
They’re being targeted by investors who have figured out how to get rich by strip-mining local-news outfits. The model is simple: Gut the staff, sell the real estate, jack up subscription prices, and wring as much cash as possible out of the enterprise until eventually enough readers cancel their subscriptions that the paper folds, or is reduced to a desiccated husk of its former self.
Folks of my generation and older still grant a great deal of ethos to our newspapers, and this is part of what groups like Alden rely on. The reputation of papers like the Tribune, having been established gradually over a century or longer, is often the final thing to vanish. Long after the journalism that produced that reputation has passed into history (and/or been laid off), the proverbial lipstick remains, to be applied sloppily to whatever barnyard animal content remains. There are pictures and bios of a Chicago Tribune Editorial Board, but how real an entity it actually might be is anyone’s guess. Only two or three of them (out of 6), as far as I could tell, “have a number of years on Prince Harry.”
As the Board itself might observe, this is “rich irony,” incorporating the reputation and gestures of an historic news organization to hoodwink its subscribers into believing that what they’re paying for is anything other than slapdash internet “content,” warmed over social media takes couched in the language of solemn journalistic opinion.
Coppins’s story continues to consider the social consequence of hollowed out news organizations; they have measurable impact on the quality and depth of information that their subscribers are exposed to. And this has a correspondingly awful effect on things like political accountability, voter turnout, and the ability of candidates to challenge incumbents. More and more, local and state governments operate outside of public view, because for generations, we’ve relied upon local media for that view. This is not good news for those of us interested in democracy.
Just these past few weeks, one of the responses to the George Santos fiasco was that it was somehow primarily a failure of local journalists. It was only well after the election itself that more prominent news organizations got wind of Santos’ TFG-level allergy to the truth. Steven Waldman has a nice piece on this for the Bulwark, about what’s happened to our local news ecosystems, Someone with more knowledge of the industry than I have should do the work of connecting Waldman’s discussion with Coppins’s, but the pieces have all been laid out for us for a long time now. It’s not just about print vs. digital, nor even about shifting models for monetization. 20th century media, like other legacy industries, have been gobbled up by vulture capital, stripped to their bones, and too many of us, myself included, remain unaware that anything’s wrong.
Waldman describes these as “ghost newspapers,” which is an apt term, reminding me of the notion of “ghost kitchens.” You might have heard of ghost kitchens as an adaptation of the restaurant industry to the pandemic, a way for them to remain open during a time when no one was eating out. If you read about them, though, ghost kitchens are basically food factories, based upon stripping down the idea of a restaurant to its barest bones. There’s a formula that traditional restaurants use to figure out how to price their food, which includes not only food cost, but labor, overhead, profits, etc. What ghost kitchens do is to take those same prices, but lower as much of the intervening costs as possible. You don’t need chefs, just recipes and line cooks, and the dining area, of course, is replaced by gig delivery. And most importantly for the apps through which folks buy this food, you need concepts. I watch my fair share of food shows, and there’s an uptick in recent years of people who do “concepts,” which are basically thematic menus that are never instantiated in actual restaurants. Instead, they are executed in commissary kitchens, marketed through gig apps like Grubhub or Doordash, and we pay them for the difference between restaurant food as we understand it, and what ghost kitchens generate. Pay for the concept, and receive the cafeteria.
And that’s what’s largely happened with newspapers, as far as I can tell. There’s no Chicago Tribune any longer, at least not the one that I grew up with and remember. There’s a Chicago Tribune concept, and lots of people who are still paying restaurant prices for the kind of writing they can find just about anywhere online. What’s most distressing about this is that if we keep pumping money into them, we incentivize a broken system. But refusing to participate in the extraction of our news ecosystem only hastens its collapse—hedge fund vampires will only hold onto them so long as there’s life to drain, after all. This is what I meant the other day about digital writing feeling like living in the ruins, by the way. The fragility of our ecosystem reveals itself to us regularly, but there’s no path outside of it, only bad choices that have been forced upon us.
At least now, I can put my bad choice (to read that infernal editorial) to rest.